Arts & Culture | Theater

‘I don’t miss being young,” playwright and essayist Richard Greenberg insisted offhandedly the other day, “although I always thought that I would.” Indeed, he reflected, “even incredibly intelligent and wise young people haven’t had the experience of time passing”— time that he views as essential for an appreciation not just of human nature but also of the rootedness of people in a particular place.

With the announced closing at the end of 2016 of the current Broadway revival of “Fiddler on the Roof,” Tevye the dairyman has been given the boot once again. Not that an eviction notice, per se, is anything new for a character whose entire religious community is kicked out from its humble village by order of the czar at the conclusion of every performance. Not to forget, either, that in the theater of world history, the Jewish people as a whole have endured many more such scenes of persecution and expulsion, again and again from ancient times until our own.

One of the most distressing, perhaps even traumatic, aspects of the current presidential campaign has been the pitting of one racial, ethnic or religious minority against another for political gain. In his new play, “Jew vs. Malta,” Jewish artist Jesse Freedman has paired works that could not seem, on the surface at least, to be more different: the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe’s “The Jew of Malta” and controversial rapper Kanye West’s 2013 album’s “Yeezus.” But by slicing and dicing the words and music, respectively, from these sources, Freedman satirizes the ways in which politicians cold-heartedly exploit and manipulate differences among groups in American society. The play runs through this weekend at La MaMa in the East Village.

Nowadays, one often hears Jews refer to themselves as “Jew-ish,” accentuating the second syllable in order to proclaim ambivalence about their religious and ethnic identity, suggesting that it is only a close approximation of, or only tangentially related to, actual membership in the tribe. Upon first hearing the title of Monica Piper’s new one-woman play, “Not That Jewish,” one might think, as I did, that the show, which opened on Sunday, is an extended exercise in downplaying, or perhaps even denigrating, Jewishness.

‘I still love seeing people fly,” actor Brandon Uranowitz, 29, says, recalling his very first trip to Broadway when he was in elementary school, when he was entranced by seeing Cathy Rigby in “Peter Pan.” Uranowitz, a native of West Orange, N.J., has seen his own career take flight in recent years, most recently as a star of “An American in Paris,” in which he played the role of Adam Hochberg, the Jewish composer and pianist (played in the 1951 film by Oscar Levant) who is forced to flee from the Nazis. Now he’s back on Broadway in yet another Jewish role, that of Mendel (a psychiatrist with questionable ethics) in the revival of William Finn and James Lapine’s “Falsettos,” a musical about a quirky Jewish, baseball-loving family that is itself coming apart at the seams.

Remember Pixar’s 2015 film “Inside Out?” It was about an 11-year-old girl, Riley, and the five primary emotions raging inside her: Joy and Sadness, Fear and Disgust. And Lewis Black.
Sorry. We meant there was Anger. It’s an easy mistake to make.